Hey, For last few days I've been looking into getting the rfc66 extender going in Geronimo but I ran into a problem. As previously mentioned on this list, the idea for the extender was to call the Tomcat/Jetty ModuleBuilders with a bundle as an input and once the deployment process was done start the generated configuration. All without creating any additional temporary or permanent bundles.
Because we don't have a single classloader that can load all the gbeans within the configuration, David Jencks added a special "classSource" attribute to GBeanData which can be used to figure out the right Bundle to load the gbean class. Now, since we use Java serialization to save and load gbeans, we actually need to set the right classloader when we deserialize the gbean. That is, during deserialization as soon as we read the "classSource" we need to lookup and set the right classloader and then read the rest of the gbean data. This should (and seems to) work when all the attributes of the gbean are accessible from the same classloader. But what about if the gbean has some attribute with some values from different classloaders? For example, the Map object we build for jndi context can contain objects from different classloaders. I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. Although maybe having a custom ObjectOutputStream with annotateClass() method that saves "classSource" type of info for each unique class might work. Ideas? Also, I'm dealing with lots of classloader issues since there is no single classloader that load all the gbean classes and module classes. A lot of Geronimo and other code assumes a single classloader and resolving these problems is time consuming and not very fun (although probably good in long term). So I'm wondering if we can still somehow assemble a single classloader in the extender. For example, the http://www.osgi.org/blog/2008/08/classy-solutions-to-tricky-proxies.html post shows a classloader that delegates a number of different bundles. Maybe we could use that in Geronimo especially since we can figure out the bundles needed from the configuration environment information. Thoughts? Jarek
